File transfer protocols such as the File Synchronization via SOAP over HTTP (MS-FSSHTTP) stateless protocol use identifiers to track and reference objects within files. In most situations, these files contain large numbers of data elements, each of which may have multiple identifiers of their own and references to other objects via those objects' identifiers. These identifiers themselves may often be large, on the order of 20 bytes in the MS-FSSHTTP protocol, so storing and manipulating these identifiers can result in a great deal of overhead.